And she wildly flung her arms around his neck.
"Oh! Gerard, Gerard! I suffer too cruelly; I cannot, I cannot bear it! Tell me at once that you will not marry her, that you will never marry her!" Her voice died away in a sob, tears started from her eyes.

Ah! those tears which she had sworn she would never shed! They gushed forth without cessation, they streamed from her lovely eyes like a flood of the bitterest grief.
"My daughter, O God! What! you would marry my daughter! She, here, on your neck where I am now! No, no, such torture is past endurance, it must not be, I will not have it!" He shivered as he heard that cry of frantic jealousy raised by a mother who now was but a woman, maddened by the thought of her rival's youth, those five and twenty summers which she herself had left far behind.

For his part, on his way to the assignation, he had come to what he thought the most sensible decision, resolving to break off the intercourse after the fashion of a well-bred man, with all sorts of fine consolatory speeches.

But sternness was not in his nature.

He was weak and soft-hearted, and had never been able to withstand a woman's tears.
Nevertheless, he endeavoured to calm her, and in order to rid himself of her embrace, he made her sit down upon the sofa.